Let me start by telling you in a brief couple of minutes what Yukon Energy does. We are the primary generator and transmitter of electrical energy in the territory. In our former life we were a federal crown corporation that provided electrical energy across Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon. But these days we're a Yukon utility.
We provide electrical energy throughout the territory to most of the communities we serve by hydro power. There are some isolated communities that are on diesel, but the majority of Yukon communities are provided with hydro from our three hydro facilities in Mayo, Whitehorse, and Aishihik, which is near the community of Haines Junction.
Up until a very short time ago, we had a significant hydro surplus in the territory. That surplus is now dwindling.
Before I proceed on the hydro side or the renewable side, I should tell you that I think it's important that members understand that the Yukon is an isolated grid, as are the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. That means we have no connection to the south and not even any connection to each other in terms of the ability to move power on either a buy or sell basis. We also have in the Yukon a full diesel backup of our system because we're an isolated grid. If we lose transmission or generation from the hydro units, we can supply with diesel. We don't like to do this because it's very expensive--and I'll come to that in a very short while.
Our hydro surplus has dwindled in very recent years to almost zero. Perhaps several years behind the Northwest Territories, we're experiencing a significant resource development boom here. We connected a new mine to our grid about a year and a half ago. That mine was connected to the grid after it was operating on diesel. So we were able to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions in the territories significantly. We were able to get the mine into a more economic position by connecting it to our grid.
We used a very innovative model, I would say. The mining company made a contribution to the transmission line project that we constructed. Even though the line itself didn't connect them, they had to build, on their own, a spur line connection to the grid. But they paid for both. They paid a contribution to the main line and they paid for their spur line.
We're adding another mine this summer, and we have several more in the pipeline, in terms of power purchase agreements, all of which will serve to increase our demand. To illustrate it for you, we produce about 350 gigawatt hours of electrical energy at the current time, and our forecast shows that by 2017 we'll be at over 550 gigawatt hours. For many businesses, that's a real positive. It's a positive for us and a positive for the territory. But in the utility business, in the infrastructure business, five or six years isn't very long. And it's not long enough.
As a utility, we're committed to clean and green production. We have no baseline production that is anything but renewable, and we intend to stay that way. But that being said, there's a big challenge in front of us. Let me give you an example, in terms of that challenge, of the difference between finding a renewable affordable power source and using diesel, which has been the traditional method for generating across the north and perhaps in other isolated regions of the country as well, in northern parts of the provinces.
We currently wholesale hydro in Whitehorse to a local distribution company. We wholesale it right now at roughly about 6.8¢ or 6.9¢ a kilowatt hour. If we had to use diesel to generate that same kilowatt hour and wholesale it... Right now the fuel cost of diesel, depending on the price of oil--so it depends on the day--is in the neighbourhood of 30¢ a kilowatt hour. Now these are significant bits of information that I'd like you to keep in your mind as we continue this discussion. That's just the fuel cost of diesel. The cost, then, of selling power goes up significantly, if we have to go to that.
When we talk about gigawatt hours, that's an energy supply term. That's why we talk about it. We also then have to pay the price of greenhouse gas emissions, which are about 700 tonnes per gigawatt hour of energy. So if I'm supplying an additional couple of hundred gigawatt hours a year of energy and I have to use diesel, my costs go up significantly, and the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that we produce goes up significantly.
We've been very fortunate in the last couple of years. The federal government has been very helpful. We've accessed some Build Canada funds—a small amount, a few million dollars—to help us on a transmission line project. We got another $5 million to help us with the installation of a turbine at a hydro plant, and we were the first recipients in the country of funds out of the Green Infrastructure Fund. We got $71 million to both build what's called the Mayo B project and to finish the completion of a transmission link that will connect to all of our grids.
We're very happy about all of that, but it's the tip of the iceberg. The solution of Mayo B will get us through the next few years, but if we get the kind of growth that we're seeing in our forecast—and we're being very conservative in our numbers—we will need significant new infrastructure. That infrastructure, I would say to you, is the base of the territory's economic future. If we can't provide economic electrical energy to both resource companies and our cities and towns as they grow, the affordability of living in the north, as my colleagues earlier have said, is already significantly higher in our minds, and that affordability gets unaffordable if we have to start charging 25¢ or 30¢ a kilowatt hour.
I know there are communities in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories where the rates are much higher, but I put it to you this way: the general retail rate in B.C., Manitoba, and Quebec is about 5.5¢ or 6¢ a kilowatt hour. In the Yukon it's about 12¢ to 14¢, depending on whether we've got diesel riders in the rates.
I want to talk specifically about what we're doing for a very quick minute. We have a very well-defined 20-year resource plan in front of us that we've been working on since 2006. In terms of trying to provide new solutions, we have a geothermal research program under way—this will be the third year of that program. I would say we're the only company in Canada doing active geothermal research. We spent $1 million last year and we'll spend another million dollars this year doing that. We have a fairly extensive hydro program in terms of enhancing our current facilities. We have a wind research program and a waste-to-energy program under way. All of this we are madly trying to advance in order to make sure that as development and growth happen in the territory, we've got electricity at the ready to be able to supply both industry and communities.
I'll tell you quickly what the single largest barrier to all of that is: we have a very small population, and energy infrastructure is very expensive. If we were not getting the funds from the green infrastructure fund to build the Mayo B project, the rate would be diesel-equivalent in terms of kilowatt hours output, and our small rate base cannot afford these things. That, I would say to you, is an issue straight across the north. You've got small populations and large infrastructure costs, they have to be paid for in a regulated industry like ours by the ratepayers, unless you can get contributions, and if they can't be affordable, then the ratepayers can't pay for them.
That leads me to another barrier—